The Prince and the Wild Geese is a story of 1832 told in words and pictures, the words almost all Brigid Brophy's, the pictures by Prince Grégoire Gagarin, artist son of the Russian ambassador in Rome after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Graceful and witty, Gagarin's drawings portray his social world much as Pope in 'The Rape of the Lock' portrayed his, in a spirit of satire touched with complicity. Gagarin's Rome, like Pope's London, emerges the more definitively from seeming, at the outset, only the backdrop to a story of thwarted passion. The drawings illustrate a simple tale: how Gagarin is obsessed with an Irish girl, Julia Taaffe, how he meets her in Rome's villas, squares and esplanades, and how in the end she refuses him. Since social convention bars him from speaking or writing seriously of his passion to the object of it, he translates himself, Julia and Rome into fantasy, a more eloquent medium than their polite foreigners' French….

Brigid Brophy must have wondered whether to use her novelist's skills to invent the missing … [dialogues, letters, and diaries], but has finally had the discretion to supply nothing but a commentary which fills in biographical information and 'reads' Gagarin's pictures. The drawings are left to tell the story, in the form of a very high-class strip-cartoon, rather as though Byron had elected to give an episode of Don Juan in the medium of Feiffer or Posy Simmons….

On the one hand, the story as it unfolds is precisely located and specific. Gagarin shows Julia attending a masked ball in Carnival time. She is rudely stared at by a visiting Englishman on a promenade…. She drops her glove, perhaps deliberately, over the balcony of a seaside hotel, for a similar-looking young man to pick up. And so on. Gagarin documents his actual world: the band of adoring young men who surround Julia are individuals, Gagarin's friends and fellow students.

But many of Julia's actions belong only to fantasy or to art. She descends on a baroque cloud, accompanied by Cupid, and fires darts unerringly at her suitors, the youthful intellectuals of the Villa Medici….

Who and what is Julia? The 'plot' of Gagarin's picture-sequence implies that she is pretty, but the face he draws is hard to read—unresponsive, even characterless, and slightly out of focus. Julia, true to her 1832 form of coinciding with the latest fashion, here performs the 1980s function of an absence in the text. Brigid Brophy injects more pathos into her situation than Gagarin does, by reminding us that she was choosing between a life of permanent exile with a foreign husband and return home to the probable social disgrace of spinsterhood….

In one respect Brigid Brophy sentimentalises Julia. It is a cheat in her commentary that she links her heroine with a more exotic kind of Irish émigré, and more principled patriots, than she and her sister had a chance to be. The Wild Geese of the book's title were the Irish upper-class Catholics who in the 18th century served the monarchies of Continental Europe because the Penal Laws at home prevented them from serving both their religion and the British King. Calling it The Prince and the Wild Geese cunningly strengthens the story's links with folk and fairy-tale, but Julia is no Wild Goose (how different it sounds in the singular), even if, inevitably, she has relatives who are. She is a 19th-century tourist, or a debutante, having her belated Season not in London, Bath or Harrogate, but in a setting in which most of the prospective husbands are likely to be Catholics….

Brigid Brophy has the feel of post-Napoleonic Romanticism. Stendhal's Le Rouge et le Noir is its text, with its nostalgia for a once-upon-a-time idealism, its perception of the world of 1830 as hopelessly trivial.